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DERMOT HEALY AND MEMORY
Ondřej Pilný1* 1Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Abstract
he article focuses on Irish author Dermot Healy’s involvement with memories of old people within two collaborative projects: the making of a ilm based on the documentary novel I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke (1997), and the development of a documentary drama with the clients of a day care centre in Co. Monaghan, entitled
Men to the Right, Women to the Let (2001). It examines the methods used to record the material and its subsequent creative use, particularly in comparison with the technique of British verbatim theatre, and in the context of the imperfections of individual memory that are detly explored in Healy’s memoir he Bend for Home (1996). he essay ultimately argues that notwithstanding problems concerning authenticity, Healy’s play, alongside O’Grady and Pyke’s book and Nichola Bruce’s ilm version of it, should be regarded as vital contributions to the formation of Ireland’s cultural memory, particularly as they powerfully reconstruct “the mundane everyday” that is so oten lost.
Keywords: Dermot Healy; Cultural Memory; Verbatim heatre.
* Professor of English and American Literature and Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University,
A compulsive probing of memory is at the very heart of the Irish writer,
poet and playwright Dermot Healy’s oeuvre1. Healy (1947-2014) is ceaselessly
fascinated with remembering and forgetting, and how individual memory functions. One of his early works, the play he Long Swim (1987), already places memory centre stage, focusing on a middle-aged intellectual sufering from Alzheimer’s disease. As much as the play seems to have been presented as an intervention against the widespread practice of conining Alzheimer’s patients to mental institutions (see Healy 2016, 41-2), and painfully details the efects that taking care of such a patient has on her loved ones, it clearly exhibits the anxiety of a writer over the idea of losing his memory. A subsequent play, On Broken Wings (1992), stages the fragmented memories of a solitary old man, described by Healy as “a stubborn survivor of another age” (Healy 2016, 173), who has returned to Ireland having spent his life working in Scotland and the US. Finally, Healy’s memoir, he Bend for Home (1996), depicts not only the gradual dismantling of the author’s aged mother’s self due to Alzheimer’s disease, but it also foregrounds a number of issues that have been at the forefront of research by contemporary cognitive science. Healy opens his book with a vivid case of memory appropriation that concerns his very birth: the colourful anecdote that he narrates obviously cannot be his own memory, and, moreover, he points out that what he believed occurred in his family in fact happened to their neighbours. Later in the book, Healy goes on to assert that “memory is always incomplete, like a map with places missing”, where the blank spaces are illed with imagination (33). he selective nature of memory is foregrounded repeatedly, particularly in the context of composing an autobiography: Healy asks questions such as “Can I lie here and sidestep some memory I’d rather not entertain […]?” (57), or “what awfulness do we leave out as memory defends its terrain? What images are locked away […]?” (101). Last but not least, he observes that our memory also tends to be selective in the sense of not espousing “the mundane everyday” (101).
to the formation of Ireland’s cultural memory, particularly as they powerfully reconstruct “the mundane everyday” that is so oten lost – in the case of I Could Read the Sky, it is the world of a nameless migrant labourer in England, and in Men to the Right, Women to the Let, ordinary life in the border counties of the Irish Free State and early Republic prior to the onset of the Troubles.
he publication of the novel I Could Read the Sky was the outcome of a long process, which had its beginning in the early 1980s when Steve Pyke started accompanying his then partner, ilm maker Nichola Bruce, on her regular trips to Ireland to see her family and friends, and began taking photographs there. Over the next decade or so, Pyke–who is now a globally celebrated portrait photographer–accumulated an extensive collection of pictures which was eventually commissioned as a book. he publishers approached Timothy O’Grady, an Irish American author born in Chicago, to write a foreword to the photographs. In the event, O’Grady took more than three years to complete the text, and what emerged was not a brief essay but an intriguing, lyrical book-length narrative of an old labourer reminiscing in London about his childhood in the West of Ireland and a life of building roads and houses in England.
When looking for an approach to writing the foreword, O’Grady naturally irst tried to ind out the stories behind the individual photographs: he listened to Steve Pyke and Nichola Bruce, and explored places where Irish people socialised in London (Enkemann; O’Grady 2015; Bruce, 138). As he recollects:
I sought people out. I read the ads in the Irish Post where people petitioned for information about lost brothers and sisters who had disappeared into the maw of England. I went to pensioners’ lunches and tea dances at Irish centres in Archway and Camden Town. I learned of hiring fairs, boxing booths, turkey stealers, pig slaughterers, dancehall romances, trench digging, slab laying and shuttering. […] But the women were the best. hey gave you the sensations and the physical material. (O’Grady 2015)
O’Grady also started accompanying Pyke on his journeys to Ireland, and stayed for some time with Dermot Healy in his house in Ballyconnell, Co. Sligo when working on the book (Browne, 144). He had met Healy earlier in London and had been an admirer of his short stories (O’Grady 2016, 19-22); even more importantly, in gathering the material for the novel, O’Grady was inspired by the interviews published by Healy in the journal Force 10 (O’Grady 2015), adopting the method evolved by its editors. his was described by Healy as follows:
We would use a pen instead of a tape recorder which would make people repeat things that they had said. his way there would be three or four versions of what people are saying and you would get a kind of correspondence of the way people talk. (Browne, 144)
“lived and travelled in the west from Donegal down to Kerry and been for two decades in Irish London–the Galtymore in Cricklewood, sessions in the Holloway Road, petitions for the Birmingham Six, lock-ins, men who dug for Murphy’s and young nurses listening to Bobby Casey play jigs and reels in a hot room in the Fulham Broadway” (O’Grady 2015) Moreover, the project turned increasingly personal as O’Grady’s father fell ill in Chicago and died during the composition of the book: the central image of an elderly man “lying in bed, fading from life” (O’Grady 2015) and remembering, together with the acute sense of a lost loved one stem largely from this experience of sudden bereavement (Bruce, 138).
As O’Grady realised that instead of writing a mere introduction, he was really working towards the creation of a more extensive text to accompany Pyke’s photographs, multiple precedents became evident. O’Grady confessed that, initially, he only knew what he didn’t want to do: “write captions, or an essay decorated with pictures”, which most photographer-writer collaborations had turned out to be (O’Grady 2015). He was looking for “a way to make a book where neither photograph nor text was subservient to the other, where each did what only it could do but where both seemed to come from the same gesture” (O’Grady 2015). O’Grady found his model in the collaborations between the arts critic and writer John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr. Berger and Mohr’s celebrated work A Seventh Man (1975) in fact ofered also a thematic parallel in its focus on the lives of migrant workers in Europe (see O’Grady and Pyke, 163). In terms of narrative, A Seventh Man also amalgamates the experience of multiple individuals into the story of a ictitious central protagonist, and foregrounds the universal namelessness of migrant labourers in foreign cities, their lack of prospects, and the impossible dream of the eventual return home. In another of Berger and Mohr’s books, Another Way of Telling (1982), the authors likewise construct a ictitious narrative of a peasant woman from the Alps who spent part of her life as a servant woman in a capital city; curiously–given that the woman’s story is told almost exclusively through photographs–it is not A Seventh Man but this work that O’Grady identiies as providing the idea of arranging the pictorial and verbal material into a ictitious story of “An old man, a labourer from the west of Ireland who played the accordion” and remembers “from his bed in Kentish Town a life of migration in pictures and words” (O’Grady 2015). In the event, O’Grady approached John Berger for comments on the manuscript, and Berger agreed to write the preface to the inished work (see O’Grady and Pyke, 163, i-iii).
phenomenon (together with the failure to identify the sources of the statistics) amounts to considerable ideological manipulation of the reader. O’Grady and Pyke’s subject certainly ofers itself for similar treatment as regards interpreting the experience of Irish poverty and the consequent hopeless subsistence abroad as an ongoing efect of British colonial rule; this, however, the book never does, and unlike A Seventh Man leaves the matter of establishing an interpretive framework to its readers. Another Way of Telling, on the other hand, does not focus as much on the socio-political context of life in rural poverty, ofering instead a keen meditation on the way meaning is constructed when looking at photographs and how this is intrinsically tied with narrative. his is an area that is never explicitly addressed in I Could Read the Sky either.
he idea of making a ilm out of the book emerged quite naturally when Nichola Bruce was helping the authors arrange the photographs in relation to the text, as someone who was closely familiar with the images. Bruce wrote the script in spring 1997, prior to the publication of the book that autumn (Enkemann; Bruce, 138). he ilm was released two years later, being the result of further collaboration between Bruce and O’Grady and Pyke, together with two cameramen and a number of celebrated Irish musicians, including the singer Íarla Ó Lionáird, iddle player Martin Hayes and guitarist Dennis Cahill, concertina player Noel Hill and singer Sinéad O’Connor, who created a remarkable soundtrack that was subsequently released on Peter Gabriel’s label Real World Records. Most of the musicians joined the project through their participation in readings from the book that accompanied installations of Pyke’s photographs all over the world. As Bruce asserts, they felt that they also had “something to say about the subject which mostly deals with emigration, disconnectedness, loss of people as you go through life and also inding things that, if you like, create redemption like music and humour” (Enkemann).
he ilm really pivots on the successful casting of the lead role, and the choice of Dermot Healy may therefore appear surprising. Healy may have been a source of inspiration as a writer and as an editor, and his portrait was in fact included in the book by O’Grady and Pyke (unbeknownst to him). He also published early extracts from the text in Force 10, and wrote one of the irst reviews (Browne, 143-4); but despite his experience in theatre making as a playwright and a director, he was certainly not a professional actor. Nonetheless, he proved to be a perfect choice, bringing along his own experience of scraping a living together in London as an Irish emigré for over a decade (see Bruce, 137-9; Browne, 143-6; Enkemann), and gave a truly remarkable performance as the nameless old man.
for scenes of the past and a 35 mm camera for most of those happening in the present. Apart from on-location work in Ireland and in a warehouse in London where the set of the protagonist’s room was built, Bruce also included archival footage of clouds and landscapes that she had ilmed in Ireland with a handycam. he result is one of the most fascinating experimental ilms of its time, featuring an original, intuitive take on representing the way human memory functions. It is also a collective artistic statement concerning a generation of Irish immigrants to England in the late 1950s who, in Bruce’s words, lived with “a pervasive sense of loss” and who were “consumed by the roads, by the buildings” (Enkemann).
Shortly ater the irst screenings of I Could Read the Sky at ilm festivals, Healy was approached to develop a play with the Clones Drama Group. he group consisted of senior citizens from towns and villages in Monaghan and Cavan who started meeting in a day care centre in Clones for weekly drama workshops in 1998. he activity was part of a collaborative project devised by Positive Age (a voluntary organisation working with older people in the North East of Ireland), the Health Services Executive North East, and the Outreach/Education Department of the Abbey heatre, which aimed to “create safety, to introduce the older people to process based drama and to link their stories and concerns with those played out in the Abbey heatre productions they attended on a regular basis” (Murphy, 144). Developing a script with a professional playwright that was to be produced by the Abbey was the inal stage of the project. he group chose Healy, who subsequently worked with it for three months, encouraging its members to “write about an incident or incidents in their lives that they remembered”, starting with the earliest, and “asking them to focus on speciic details of character, situation and setting and in particular to focus on writing dialogue” (Murphy, 147, 151). Some of the participants wrote their stories in letter form, sometimes providing multiple stories. hese texts became the material from which Healy created Men to the Right, Women to the Let (Murphy, 147).
he play was irst performed at the Abbey heatre Bar in 2001, as part of the annual Bealtaine Festival set up to celebrate creativity in old age. It was directed by Dermot Healy, featured Mick Lally, Eileen Colgan and Helen Norton, and the audience included the Clones Drama Group. he play was subsequently presented in hospitals in Cavan Town and Castleblaney, Co. Monaghan. A radio adaptation was broadcast by RTÉ in 2002, and the stage production was revived for a week’s run at the Peacock heatre as part of Bealtaine in 2003, with John Olohan taking the part of Mick Lally.
he term verbatim refers to the origins of the text spoken in the play. he words of real people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during an interview or research process, or are appropriated from existing records such as the transcripts of an oicial enquiry. hey are then edited, arranged or recontextualised to form a dramatic presentation, in which actors take on the characters of the real individuals whose words are being used. (9)
A deining characteristic of this form of documentary theatre has been its outspoken politicality. As the prominent verbatim playwright Robin Soans has argued, the arts are not merely to provide entertainment but “should also be the vessel which contains the conscience of a nation” (Hammond and Steward, 17). Typically, verbatim plays have focused on controversial international and domestic issues, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conlict (David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, 1998, or My Name Is Rachel Corrie by Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman, 2005), the war on terror (Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans, 2005), the privatisation of railways in the UK (David Hare’s he Permanent Way, 2003), institutional racism (he Colour of Justice by Richard Norton-Taylor, 1999), or riots in England (Gilian Slovo’s he Riots, 2011). It is only rarely that verbatim playwrights have addressed more private topics, such as Alecky Blythe in Cruising (2006), which focused on the love life of the elderly.
he objectives of verbatim theatre have been summarised as “stating the problems more clearly” and “trying to give the audience a broader base of knowledge of whichever subject is being tackled”. he audience assumption of a verbatim play therefore is that “what they are looking at and listening to is revelatory and truthful” (Soans in Hammond and Steward, 18, 19). he notion of truthfulness and the authenticity that is associated with the fact that the material comes from eye-witness accounts are problematic, however, given the fact that what the spectators are watching is the creation of an artist (or a theatre group). Apart from making aesthetic choices, the artist faces the pragmatic issue of engaging the audience. As Soans has outlined, verbatim plays are inherently based on stories that are to be delivered to the spectators; nonetheless, “No matter how compelling the speeches are in terms of truthfulness and revelation in their own right, the verbatim play must be more than a random collection of monologues if it is to sustain interest over a whole evening” (Hammond and Steward, 26). While a creative arrangement of the testimonials into captivating form is thus inevitable if the production is to succeed, the artist naturally stands open to the accusation of manipulating the material. he accusation is diicult to dismiss, at least in principle; it may be answered only by emphasising the ethical obligation of the theatre maker to his/her informers. Robin Soans phrases the obligation quite simply: when working with the material, you must “Never forget it’s someone’s life” (Hammond and Steward, 36).
verbatim” has emerged in which the recordings of the testimonials are played to actors into headphones in performance and the actors are to repeat what they hear exactly), quite a few have eschewed recording devices in favour of pen and paper. his has happened particularly when the subject matter was private and/ or traumatic, such as when Robin Soans was conducting interviews with people involved in paramilitary warfare for his play Talking to Terrorists; in his view, the presence of a recording device prevents the interviewee from opening up fully (Hammond and Steward, 34-5). In the present context, the method of writing down the words on paper brings us back to the interviewing style developed in Force 10, and subsequently adopted by Timothy O’Grady for his book. We have seen that the Force 10 interviewers would make their subject repeat what he or she said, the idea being to capture an “exceptionally true version of the subject’s thoughts and voice”, as one of the editors of the journal has put it (Leyden, 87). he process also allowed for the authorisation of the statements as they were being read back to the interviewee (Leyden, 87). Needless to say, this method is considerably time-consuming, and it may not be particularly feasible in a discussion of matters such as killing people, torture or child abuse, to name only a few of the topics that appear in Talking to Terrorists. In a case like that, then, it will be impossible to capture what is being said literally, word for word, and a degree of editing will thus occur as early as in the recording of the statement. Soans has argued that what ultimately matters is “truth in spirit” rather than literal truth, since literal truth (i.e., all interviews word for word in their entirety) cannot be feasibly replicated on the stage in any case (Hammond and Steward, 41). Be that as it may, good awareness of the interviewing and editing process is seminal if we wish to properly think about the impression of authenticity with which spectators or readers approach works based on memories.
happened.” (Browne, 144) he awareness of the constructed nature of memory (to which I will return later) provided further justiication of creative liberty for the playwright, going beyond the mere need to engage the spectators. In the same spirit, he appears to have used some memories of his own in the play, justiied by the fact that he grew up in Cavan during some of the period depicted in Men to the Right, Women to the Let.2
Healy amalgamated the source material into a play for three performers, two female and one male, who each speak in the voices of a number of individuals; some of them are named and will be recognised for themselves as the play unfolds, other voices remain anonymous. Monologue is completely eschewed in favour of the stories being enacted as conversations, with one memory triggering another. As a result, the play really presents an act of communal remembering, in that the characters, oten seen remembering particular events together, ill in details for one another and react to what others say, as in the following childhood scene:
W1. But no one took the slightest heed. You see nobody loved me. Not a one in the world. Not a soul in the earthly. Not one in all eternity. W2: Ah stay quiet.
W1: So I decided I would get even with them. I decided I would do my number two.
MAN: Good God.
W1: I pushed and I shoved till I’m sure I was purple in the face and … alas, there my memory ends. [Goes back to her seat.] Gone. Just like that. For the life of me I’ve forgot. But I would not let it be, would I. I would not. Years later I was talking to Aunty Mai. Were you there that day? I asked her.
W2: I was.
W1: And did anything … happen? W2: Nothing happened.
W1: No?
W2: No. You were always tight. W1: hank you.
W2: hink nothing of it.
W1: See? hat was our crowd. Loved? Hah! (Healy 2016, 372-3)
Moreover, the audience are referred to as “neighbours” by the performers at the onset (367), extending the sense of community to those who are watching.
to be provided by a large number of small companies with a low level of capital resulted in railways running at such a loss that by the end of the 1950s, all lines and stations in the region closed. his state of afairs sadly obtains until the present day (“Railways in Monaghan”; Parker and Sexton).
Healy’s work with chronology in Men to the Right, Women to the Let is quite intricate (which is typical of many of his other works, including he Bend for Home and his most famous novel, A Goat’s Song, 1994). he irst part of the play concerns memories of childhood and adolescence, instigating the expectation of linear chronology. his expectation is largely met in the second part, which opens with a depiction of young people going to dances, lirting and falling in love (the world of the dance halls also gives the title to the play, referring to the separation of men and women on either side of the hall, similarly to the seating arrangement in the early days of local cinemas that is described later). However, the linearity is complicated from the very beginning by frequent lashbacks or shits into the future, and in the third part, the intuitive sense of time progression is gradually cancelled altogether. he third part of the play does describe a wedding that follows a courtship depicted shortly before, but instead of following a linear chronology, it is dominated by a succession of stories of loss and death: it features a story of a brother who disappeared, the death of an ageing mother and father (both of which occurred when the speakers were in their teens or early twenties, which places them earlier in terms of “historical” time), and the breakdown of a marriage. It is also in this part that connections to speciic moments of history are irst made: no dates are ever mentioned in the play, but here the characters are for instance seen listening to the radio when World War II is declared, and to de Valera’s speech in which he refused to make Irish ports available to the British navy. he train is heard twice again in the course of the third part, both times at a distance, functioning as an aural relection of the change in what may have initially seemed like a natural sequencing of the events. Eventually, the action returns to the opening scene of the play, in which a father and a mother are seen waking up their daughter and are getting ready for a day’s work of bringing the hay in. he image of the family at work together, with the help of an orphaned young man who they have in efect adopted in his teens, closes the play.
report in 2009. he adherence to a conservative Catholic attitude to relationships and marriage is also depicted as unchanging, and is harrowingly relected in the story of a young woman who let her husband three months ater their wedding because she became a victim of domestic violence–the woman is rejected by her parents, has to move in with her grandmother and spends the rest of her days living single on the fringes of society.
when we try to recover past experience, we discover that some things have been forgotten, we misremember others, and consciously or unconsciously, we oten suppress uncomfortable or traumatic events. Second, when memories are communicated to others, they are inevitably structured into narratives (see, e.g., Frawley, 27-9), which involve, for instance, causality, emphasis, and marginalisation. And inally, remembering always happens in relation to a present context; put aptly by Emilie Pine, memory is “always both backwards and forwards looking, a space of narratives and myths constructed by and for individuals and communities” (Pine, 3).
he communal nature of remembering was the principal point of attention of the founding father of contemporary memory studies, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs who devised the concept of collective memory in the 1920s, arguing that any individual remembering always happens in a social context (see Halbwachs).3 Working from Halbwachs’ theses on how societies remember, Jan and Aleida Assmann have dedicated nearly four decades of research to developing and reining their concept of cultural memory. hey conceive of cultural memory as the very foundation of collective identity; cultural memory is a dynamic repository of memories which involves the creation of tradition, the society’s relation to the past, its political identity and political imagination (see Assmann 2001, esp. 26). In other words, cultural memory is an objectivised culture in the broadest sense; it is the culture’s heritage that is always related “to an actual and contemporary situation” (Assmann 1995, 130).4 he Assmanns agree with Halbwachs that collective memory is always associated with afects and values (Assmann 2001, 39), and emphasise particularly the ethical obligation involved in the shaping of cultural memory, which may be expressed by the question of “what we must not forget” (Assmann 2001, 31). In this they join Paul Ricoeur, who speaks of the obligation “to save the history of the defeated and the lost” (Ricoeur 1988, 187).
While Ricoeur’s principal concern is with the history of victims and oppressed or marginalised groups, I support oral historians in believing that the “debt of recognition to the dead” that Ricoeur speaks of (Ricoeur 1988, 143) should be extended also to ordinary lives since without these, adequate insight into the past is impossible. It may be true that the personal memories on which an account of everyday life will largely be based are unreliable because of all the reasons outlined above, but dismissing them entirely (like Halbwachs did) would mean that the only access we have to the past is through historical documents and material artefacts–which, as a matter of fact, is a view that is rarely subscribed to even by historians these days.
clearly be wrong. However, as Ricoeur has shown, iction–and by extension all art–“can refer to aspects of being ungraspable by descriptive discourse” (Ricoeur 1984, 79-80). Ann Rigney has recently corroborated Ricoeur’s point, arguing that the arts should be regarded as important “carriers of memory” since they “afect people in the intimate realm of pleasure and emotions” (McIvor and Pine, 186). Moreover, creative renderings of the past such as ilms or contemporary historical novels increasingly serve as the irst introductions to particular historical eras to non-specialists. hese phenomena are being progressively acknowledged by contemporary memory scholars, who now generally accept contemporary artistic representations as important sources for the formation of cultural memory (see, e.g., Misztal, 6; McIvor and Pine).
I Could Read the Sky (both as a book and a ilm) and Men to the Right, Women to the Let should therefore be considered as valuable contributions to the discourse in which Ireland’s cultural memory is being shaped. Evidence shows that I Could Read the Sky has been regarded as such by audiences across Ireland, since the ilm still tends to be screened on special occasions and at festivals and O’Grady continues to give readings from the book (for instance, it was chosen as the Book of the Festival by the Bealtaine organisers in 2015 and Mark Knopler wrote a song based on it; see O’Grady, 2015). However, no such recognition has occurred with Healy’s play, which has regrettably disappeared from public discourse ater its two presentations and radio adaptation, which only a limited number of people were able to see or hear. At least in the view of the present writer, Men to the Right, Women to the Let deserves to be given a high-proile revival that would acknowledge it as the accomplished reimagining of ordinary lives that it is, and also a play that made available the vanishing voices of people that began to be captured only later in oral history projects such as Border Lives (see Dybris McQuaid, 75-6). It is a play that treats the rural landscape of Monaghan and Cavan as a potential mnemotope (Assmann 2001, 56-7)–a landscape that carries memories vital to an understanding of the present. Its emphasis on community indicates that the cultural memory of the inhabitants of Ireland should not record only the tension and segregation that have been generally accepted as a deining characteristic of life in the border counties. Indeed, the individual memories of everyday experience captured in Men to the Right, Women to the Let may be seen as a challenge to the ways in which the relation between the individual and the collective has been signiied in Irish culture and politics.
Notes
1. he writing of this article was supported from the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
said to have been “very cut up” when Healy’s grandmother died: “I never told her I loved her,” he laments (see Healy 2016, 403; Healy 1996, 265; italics in the original). he memory of the mother always bringing tea to the family working on the bog featured in the inal scene of Men to the Right, Women to the Let also has a parallel in Healy’s family: he describes this as a memory of his own mother in he Writing in the Sky, an award-winning RTÉ documentary about his life and work (see Healy 2016, 416; he Writing in the Sky, 08:30).
3. As Jan Assmann has pointed out, Halbwachs’ research had a contemporary parallel in that of the art historian and cultural critic Aby Warburg, who devised the concept of “social memory” under the inluence of Durkheim (Assmann 1995, 125).
4. As regards the context of Ireland, the ground-breaking work has been the recent four-volume collection of essays Memory Ireland edited by Oona Frawley (2011-2014). However, Frawley’s own attempt to postulate a new concept of cultural memory that would be tailor-made to “postcolonial Ireland” (Frawley, 29-34) is superluous when considered in relation to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s work, which is underpinned by the analysis of dozens of cultures ancient, modern and contemporary, and zooms in on a variety of ruptures and cataclysms in history (including colonisation) that have deined the cultural memory formation there (see, e.g., Assmann 2001, 35).
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